Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk [134]
Sing softly of the evening’s coming and of the evening meal, the sausage and eggs and the red tomatoes and the fresh loaf with the crackled brown crust, the milk in the jug that was a wedding gift, the square of butter under glass. The white tablecloth, the oven glove around the ears of the black iron saucepan, the sitting-down, the hands under low light, around the knives, around the forks, the spoons with the ivory handles, the people who look at each other, or do not look, speak to each other, or do not speak, or speak without words. Sing, that you may be consoled. Because that you now have to do for yourself, as you’ve always had to do.
Oh sing, sing, Agaat, of the wind that blows from the south and the ship in the offing, because it is in the offing. I see it in the distance. White is its bow and its splines are white and it’s coming over the hump-backed hills, closer I see it coming, ever closer.
I understand. You don’t think my joke this afternoon was funny. It’s a sad song, that’s all.
I open my eyes. The lights are suddenly on in the room.
Look, says Agaat, with all the hubbub you haven’t even seen yet.
She points next to my bed.
The rainbow is gone. Now there is a mountain with a vlei in front of it. It is full of white water-hawthorn. The mountains reflect a darkness amongst the flowers. An early-morning scene, a painting from the sitting room. I thought we had thrown it away.
The blue blue hills of home, says Agaat, I went and fetched it from the cellar.
And look here, the portrait of the grandmother. I thought you might want to see it once more.
It’s the portrait in front of which my mother used to make me stand when I was small. Her hand heavy on my shoulder. Look, Milla, it’s she who farmed into being this little plot of earth. One day it will be yours.
A matriarch in the making, her mouth young, her plump white fingers folded round a rolled-up document, her hair pulled back tightly in a bun, her cheeks two touched-up red stains, the collar around her neck of fine white lace, the one eye small and fierce, the other one larger, clear-sighted, the eye over which something reflects distractingly on the gibbous glass of the oval frame, a rectangle of white, my bed, a smudge of grey, my head, my grey hair on the pillow.
Clear out clear out my iniquitous life! screams the bob-head-doll she strikes her stick on the floor give away! bequeath! burn! the wise hoard no button the prudent begin discarding at fifty a lifetime’s gleaned-together rags tassels and tatters those condemned to death would have to clear out all save the rope of the gallows enviable the chaste suicide’s furious meticulousness museums are in cahoots with the negligence of the dying a comb a necklace a shoe-horn writers hook after the last hung-up coat a hat behind the door rummage in bottom drawers they the custodians should rather have to sing inflammatory songs in the archives should with the last cadences have to dig holes in the cellars raise demolition-axes light purifying fires come beloveds let us expedite the onslaught of moth and rust! and let us inspire the breath of the blowing dust! start with the linen cupboard! start with the veil-netting of the third dress of a woman start with the redundant winding-cloths the cosy